Surrealism and Modernism: From the Collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum

Many of the works - in particular the museum's Surrealist paintings - were bought directly from the artists or from their very first exhibitions. The famed Chick Austin, director of the Atheneum from 1929 to 1944, mounted the first Surrealist exhibition in America in 1931 and proceeded to buy a work by the then relatively little known Salvador Dali. Examples by de Chirco, Cornell, Matta, Calder, and Ernst soon followed. Later, when painters such as Tanguy and his wife, Kay Sage, settled in Connecticut, they became friends with Austin, and works by them and owned by them, such as an admirable painting by Magritte, eventually came to the Atheneum. In 1934 the museum presented the first great American retrospective of Picasso, and Austin was able to buy one small neo-classical example, which over the years has been supplemented by four other Picasso paintings. Austin's successor purchased works by Stanley Spencer, Henry Moore, Maillol, and Marini. In More recent years, examples of American modernists and expressionists such as Georgia O'Keeffe, Arthur Dove, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock have entered the collection to provide a broad overview of artistic trends of the last century.